Why hasn’t Broadcast sent my email yet?
We made Broadcast to help you send emails you would want to receive, to an audience you have a relationship with. It’s a simpler, smaller Mailchimp attached to your Highrise contact database. There are some unique constraints to providing such a feature, so I wanted to walk through some of how we handle your Broadcasts.
So as someone who has a paying Highrise account you just need a list of opted-in contacts and useful message to send to those contacts.
That’s it.
As a provider, there’s quite a bit more we have to consider to protect the service and keep it running for everyone. Because of some nuance to the world of email, those considerations may end up affecting you directly.
We’re protecting both you and ourselves from legal action. In the US, we have laws like CAN-SPAM that restrict the kinds of messages you can send to your customers. Europe and others have their own laws as well. CAN-SPAM, specifically, restricts the use of misleading messages, requires you identify messages as ads when relevant, and demands you provide a clear path to opt-out of future messaging, among other restrictions.
We’re protecting our servers from being tagged as spam by recipient servers. Services like Gmail keep track of how many people are marking a specific email as spam. If a pattern of spam or bounces emerges from a specific email server, like a Broadcast server, that puts everyone using the service at risk for being filtered into the spam folder. On the flip side, managed well, everyone benefits from a strong reputation.
So those two things are the main concerns:
- Laws protecting recipients from questionable campaigns
- Maintaining a strong reputation among recipient email services.
How do we protect you against this? We don’t treat everyone the same.
When you start, we don’t know you. We’d love to trust all of the people who use our product. When it comes to email, though, one bad apple could ruin it for everyone.
So we take our relationship slow. When you start sending bulk email with us, you have a small email “velocity” where we only send small numbers of your email per hour to see that your recipients are in fact receiving the message and how they react.
During this time you must maintain an extremely low bounce rate and even a tiny number of spam complaints will pause your Broadcasting abilities and we’ll review the message and your case by hand. During our review, we may contact you, ask you to clean things up a bit.
After you’ve demonstrated low bounce and spam rates, you’ll slowly become more trusted. Your sending velocity will gradually increase. You’re given a little more breathing room with bounces and spam, since a couple of spam complaints across several thousand successful messages is much less problematic than 1 spam complaint out of 10 messages.
Note that at any point, questionable email activity, spam or bounce rates warrants us pausing your account to protect you and the rest of our users.
Email is a touchy world. People are aggressively against spam. And they use services to protect them from having to deal with spam. We want our customers to be able to efficiently reach their audience so we have to work to protect that ability for everyone.
For tips on how to be a good steward and write emails your contacts want to read, check out Chris Gallo’s post.
